InSight landing site, Localization & views from orbiters Options

[elakdawalla]

Hi folks, I've reopened the EDL thread I'm starting a thread for discussion of landing site localization. There was a figure in today's Sounds of Mars press briefing that shows the location of the landing site, on HiRISE image ESP_036761_1845

[nogal]

Here is, ready for Google Mars, an orbital map of the InSight landing area. It is a rectangle of roughly 2.82x2.56 km cropped from HiRISE image ESP_036761_1845, specifically from the Merged RGB (MRGB) product.

I registered it using the coordinates tweeted by Livio Tornabene, thank you Livio! The MRGB image has a resolution of 0.5m and Livio's coordinates' accuracy is about 6m, meaning there is room for relocation...

Since the map is 34MB big I can't post it here. Instead I placed it in Google Drive, here is the link: InSight_Orbital_Map_ESP_036761_1845.kmz

I also added the three hardware cutouts from ESP_058005_1845 to InSight EDL kml file. So if you dowload the above file and install it, then download and install this file
 InSight_EDL_Sim.kmz ( 1.3MB ) Number of downloads: 1167

you will be able to see the hardware superimposed on the orbital map, like this:



You will notice some misadjustments between the HW cutouts and the base map, despite having spent several hours doing location adjustments. I think this is because, as Phil pointed out, the cutouts are not map projected. So, once the full ESP_058005_1845 image is available I may revisit this. Enjoy

Fernando